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Sechs Gesänge, Op 107

Introduction

The Op 107 songs are a product of the Schumann’s move to Düsseldorf where the composer was appointed municipal director of music. At first things went well there, and this collection reflects a period when the composer hoped—in vain as it turned out—that his health had returned.

The Op 107 songs are united by a mood of wistful other-worldliness. The theme is unreciprocated love, whether it is poor suicidal Ophelia in love with Hamlet, the gardener in love with a princess, a girl spinning a trousseau in vain and so on. This is not tragic music, rather does it contain the delicate half-lights of fairytale and fantasy.The characters, some of them folk-tale archetypes, all seem to come from old German picture-books The music seems fragile and much responsibility lies in the hands of the performers who need to have a light touch to find the correct transparency of texture. As a whole the cycle has many exquisite moments and cries out not to be measured by the standards of the 1840 songs. Aribert Reimann has made an arrangement of this set for string quartet and voice; for this he transposes the music into higher keys.

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'Schäfer evokes comparison with Elisabeth Schumann and with the young Elly Ameling, whom in tone and freshness of response she often resembles. In sum ...'Her voice combines ethereal radiance and clarity with resolute, unwavering focus. Johnson's account of the piano parts is superlative [and] his bookl ...» More

Schumann’s connections with the Bard are sadly not strong: only the very first of the 1840 songs, Schlusslied des Narren, ranks as an actual Shakespeare setting. Herzeleid is Shakespearean in inspiration if not authorship. Ulrich’s much shortened gloss on Queen Gertrude’s famous speech in Hamlet Act IV Sc.7 (‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream’) describes the watery suicide of Ophelia. Berlioz’s song La mort d’Ophélie is a similar (if much longer) adaptation by the poet Legouvé of the same speech, a poem also set to music much later by Saint-Saëns. Schumann’s music succeeds in depicting not only the tone of the narrator—too shocked to be overtly grief-stricken—but also something of the nature of Ophelias’s madness, long past the sinister and shocking rhyming of Act IV Sc.5, and now given to chanting ‘snatches of old tunes as one incapable of her own distress’. As we shall see as we progress through Op 107, Ophelias’s music, past remonstrance and depicting inward suffering, sets the tone for the other songs in the set. As in Die Blume der Ergebung and a number of other earlier Schumann songs (e.g. Hör ich das Liedchen klingen from Dichterliebe) the right-hand little finger pricks out the melody (as if sung by Ophelia in the water) as accompanying semiquavers fall away down the stave in gently submissive fashion.

A modest song this in every sense, but somehow most affecting. The tiny fanfares of the introduction are no doubt meant to describe the festive celebrations of the ‘Feiertag’ which open the song; perhaps they go some way to establish that the background of the story is not modern, but rather like that of Der Gärtner or Die Spinnerin, part of that quasi-medieval background common to all fairytales. The broken window-pane is in an old casement and we can almost see it in an illustrated volume of stories by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. It is of course a servant who is cleaning windows so this song belongs to that genre of songs in which a working-class girl is enamoured of a noble gentleman—Das verlassene Mägdlein or Seit ich ihn gesehn from Frauenliebe und -leben come to mind. The vocal line is so shy that one is scarcely conscious that melody is being invented—the music seems to be governed by the sound patterns of inner speech or concealed thought. The way that the man goes proudly by at ‘Da geht er stolz vorbei!’ with the dotted rhythms in the piano part suggest that this may be a high-born official or prince. There is a shocked gap in the vocal line after ‘und gleich aus kam das Blut gerannt’ as the basses descend in semitones as if to depict the oozing wound. The elongated setting of ‘über’ also illustrated the spread of an ominous red patch. The tiny interlude after ‘rot über meine Hand’ suggests that the narrator with swimming head is pulling herself together with an effort to avoid losing consciousness. Falling bass lines are a feature of the song, as if blood is draining away right though the song’s second page. There is the added possibility that she is faint with morning sickenss or some other symptom of pregnancy with his child. There is a small attempt to describe the sound of the breaking glass by putting the vocal line at its highest point for ‘Und laut das Glas geknickt’. Otherwise all is hurt humility and hopeless love. The unsettled chromatics on ‘als leis mein Herz geknickt’ are typical of late Schumann; those who say they sound confused may be reminded that the narrator of the song is also extremely confused (not to say near fainting) and that the music sounds convincing in this context.

The original key of the previous song is B minor, and this follows in the relative major. One may be critical of the fact that the opening rhythm of Der Gärtner seems to be derived from that of Die Fensterscheibe and that this is a sign of Schumann’s limited inspiration, were it not possible that the composer deliberately placed the two songs together as a complementary pair with complementary tonalities—hopeless love of maid for prince in the latter song, hopeless love of young man for princess in Der Gärtner. Perhaps they work at the same palace and we cannot help hoping that the window-cleaner and the gardener come together to assuage their grief.

Of course, almost all lovers of Lieder will have grown up with the setting of this poem by Hugo Wolf and it is certain that Wolf knew this song and took certain details from it, most important of all the prancing triplets for the little steed, almost rocking-horse-like, belonging to the princess. Wolf’s setting is all lucidity and delight and of course the greater song, but Schumann’s strikes us as rather more quirky and modern. And it grows on you the more you hear it (and play it). The strangest anomalies are to do with prosody: why on earth ‘Leibröslein’ at the beginning and ‘alle dafür’ at the end? Was the composer aiming at a feeling of dislocation, or merely attempting to make the performers ignore the tyranny of the accented bar line? The accompaniment has too many ideas to achieve unity. Sams counts more than two dozen ways of filling up a bar of 2/4 time. Despite these criticisms, the song has a luminous humility which makes one slightly impatient with those performances of the Wolf setting which can all too easily emphasise its Viennese charm and winsomeness. The awkwardness of Schumann’s gardener can work to his advantage.

This is a charming song, delicately scored and beautifully crafted. If only Brahms had not written his masterful Mädchenlied to the same text we might imagine that Schumann’s song had captured this poem to perfection. It is a weird coincidence that the Brahms song composed some forty-five years later is also his Op 107 (No 5 rather than No 4). Could this have been a deliberate homage to his old mentor on the part of the younger composer, particularly as he also chose the key of B minor for his setting? Despite a certain inappropriate merriness for a song in the minor key there is much to recommend the Schumann: the vocal line is elegant and telling and the accompaniment is charming and runs throughout the piece as deftly as the spinning motif in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. If its purling progress of minor seconds reminds us a little too much of the accompaniment for Der Sandmann or even for Zigeunerliedchen I we must assume that Schumann was in the mood to write children’s songs, or second-childhood songs, rather than real tales of abandonment and grief. Brahms’s setting is searing and unforgettable, a mirror of the composer’s own loneliness and alienation. In this whole set of songs the window-cleaner, the gardener and the spinner are not real people for the composer but rather fairytale characters; it is paradoxical that when Schumann wrote a cycle to words of a real master of fairytales (the Hans Andersen songs, Op 40) the gruesome side of the texts is realised unflinchingly and dramatically. But that was in 1840. It is one of the charms of this Op 107 cycle that it is pervaded by an air of other-worldly unreality, but here we might wish for more involvement; the spinning-girl never really comes alive despite a number of felicities, e.g. after ‘die Hände zaudern’ (‘the hands falter’) the pianist’s hands also falter in an interlude which jumps higher in the keyboard than at any other time, straying outside the normal harmonic range of the song in the same way that the girl’s hands are distracted from her normal task. Points like these are not quite enough to dispel the feeling that the composer is more fascinated with the continuation of the spinning motif than concerned with the girl’s terrible predicament. Like Gretchen (and the symbolic breaker of Die Fensterscheibe) the narrator of this song is not only abandoned but also probably pregnant.

One thinks of other Schumann songs from 1840 about walking, or about forests: the intensity of Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend, the bravura of Wanderlied, the merry hunting-horn energy of Wanderlied (all from the Kerner Lieder Op 35), the charged intensity of Waldesgespräch from Liederkreis Op 39 and so on. This song has none of the qualities of its distinguished forbears but it has something all its own. Apart from a number of fp markings for emphasis the dynamic is more or less piano throughout. The marking is ‘Ziemlich lebhaft’ and the walking rhythm has a hint of jauntiness. Nevertheless the theme, as in all the Op 107 songs, is one of loss and loneliness—the key word is ‘ich zieh so allein in den Wald hinein’. There is something about this music which refuses to be self-pitying or self-dramatising. One thinks of the entirely different mood of the Brahms’s setting Die Mainacht where the poem has a very similar thrust—a solitary person is challenged by seeing all of Nature in pairs. There is a mood of containment here that one sometimes finds in the earlier Schumann songs: Ich kann’s nicht fassen from Frauenliebe und -leben or Die Stille from the Eichendorff Liederkreis come to mind. These songs have accompaniments which use short note-values or staccato chords to depict a type of feminine fragility, and these staccato chords are to be found in Im Wald, as if the walk through the forest is being taken by small feet and dainty. If it is true that Schumann gave some thought to the thematic unity of this cycle, it follows that in an opus number which contains Gertrude’s words to Ophelia, the words of a serving-maid and of a spinning-girl, Schumann thought of the whole set as a cycle for woman’s voice. The dedication of the set to Sophia Schloss (1822–1903) seems to prove this: she was a mezzo-soprano whom the composer knew from his Leipzig days and who moved to Düsseldorf at the same time as the Schumanns. Fischer-Dieskau rightly excluded most of the Op 107 songs from his DGG survey of Schumann songs, and yet a German bass from the older generation like Georg Hann included Im Wald in his repertory. This type of voice could do nothing but emphasise the pallidity of the song in comparison to the hearty masculinity of the Kerner walking-songs. On the other hand a lighter brighter voice can turn the trudge through the forest into something more ethereal, as if walking on air. And this colour is also to be sought by the pianist: in Der Gärtner the piano part is headed by the words ‘Zart und leicht zu begleiten’ (‘To be accompanied gently and lightly’). This surely applies to all the songs in this set, and to a good many songs in the late period.

All is still;
so hushed is the evening
that you can hear
the footfalls of passing angels.
All around, night
darkens and deepens;
now cast away your sickness, my heart,
and your despair.

Now the stars arise in majesty
in the encircling sky;
the golden chariot of time
passes on its assured way.
And your way through the night
shall be safely guided too,
so now cast away your sickness, my heart,
and your despair.

The effect of this ravishing little song is like that of a Christmas carol—its strophic nature and mention of the angels and the gently rocking rhythm, cradle or crib-like, only reinforces that impression. Added to this is a feeling of purity and transparency. The song is like a balm and blessing, a magic spell laid on the rest of the cycle to cure the ills of serving-maid and gardener, and the lonely walker in the forest—also presumably on poor Kinkel who was in prison as Schumann wote it. In this song, Fischer-Dieskau writes, ‘we hear the “angelic voices” artistically transformed, which became a constant obsession of the composer; he heard them continually’. If this is so, Schumann’s madness, like Hölderlin’s or Christopher Smart’s, has produced something of ethereal beauty where the disturbed creative spirit, distant from its previous achievements, brings something of its own to enhance the poem. The conflict of rhythm between the triplets of the accompaniment and the duplets of the vocal line (which Sams finds artificial) needs to be tactfully resolved by the performers so that the effect is not that of gear-changing but rather of gentle languor. Schumann has changed Kinkel’s poem which originally reads ‘Rings in die Thale senket sich Finsterniss mit Macht’ (‘All round, night darkens in the valley’). Substituting the word ‘Tiefe’ (depths) for ‘Tale’ gives the composer the excuse to write a remarkable sequence of snaking crotchet triplets in the depths of the piano—the deepest phrases in the accompaniment. In this song all is shining serenity, the hopeful dream of a composer who fervently wished for this type of inner peace.